Category: Tabletop Games

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Original ‘D&D’ and 5th Edition, Some Side-by-Side Comparisons Part I

James Floyd Kelly16

For the past few weeks, I’ve been doing some investigations into “classic” Dungeons & Dragons for an upcoming Adventurers League three-week (six hours) session. Way before Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, and even before the Basic Set (1977) that was my starting point with the game. I’m talking about what many folks refers to as Original D&D or OD&D.

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‘Hoyuk’: Expand Your Neolithic Clan

Jonathan H. Liu

10,000 years ago in the region of Anatolia in what is now the Middle East, early civilizations began to take root—hunter-gatherers settled down and started farming. Clans came together and built settlements. But life was not without disasters: floods, droughts, earthquakes, and famines had sometimes devastating consequences. In Hoyuk, you play a Neolithic clan, eager to establish your family in this emerging community.

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Adventurers League

D&D Encounters DM Report — Sholla’s Dream Part I

James Floyd Kelly

Wednesday nights are D&D Encounters sessions (for novice and veteran players) at Titan Games & Comics in Atlanta, GA (and at other locations around the globe), and for the last few weeks I’ve enjoyed my return to the role of Dungeon Master. Last week concluded a two-part adventure that had the players encountering a group of cultists hiding out in a cavern beneath a crypt where they were performing a dark ritual to strengthen a young black dragon. The players were successful in defeating the dragon and collapsing the only escape from the cavern after narrowly escaping a chase around a circular four-level ramp that led to the bottom of said cavern. RIP cultists.

This week, the players found themselves in the city of Elturel, hunting down Leosin, a monk who had given them an earlier mission to try and discover information on this new dragon cult. The players made their way into the city where they would need to find Leosin as well as the Order of the Gauntlet to receive the reward that was promised them when they defeated the black dragon and cultists.

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Adventurers League

D&D Encounters DM Report — Running a Chase & The Road to Elturel Part II (Conclusion)

James Floyd Kelly

Last night as I was setting up my table for the night’s game, I began to receive some fun and interesting comments about my 3D creation for running the second-half of my mini-adventure, The Road to Elturel. Our game night coordinator, Topher, continues to call me an over-achiever. I can live with that. I’ve always tried to push myself to give my players a memorable game; when I was younger, I would create props and sketches to hand out at different points in a game. Now that I’m a bit older and wiser (and have a debit card), I’m finding I have even more fun and interesting ideas to toss at my players… such as the situation where my players found themselves tonight.

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Adventurers League

D&D Encounters Report — Digital DMing and The Road to Elturel Part I

James Floyd Kelly9

For this week’s game, I chose to create a two-part mini-adventure that takes place on the road halfway between Greenest and Elturel. Given the cultists and a few other bad guys/creatures encountered in earlier sessions, I decided to try and create an adventure that would be loosely linked to the goings-on along the Sword Coast. Joining my table for the night were the following adventurers:

Essie – Human Fighter
Chi Tan – Human Fighter
Oenn – Dwarf Cleric
Rolann – Elf Ranger
Edaliu – Gnome Bard
Borax – Dwarf Cleric

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Tiny Epic Galaxies

Kickstarter Tabletop Alert: Tiny Epic Galaxies

Jonathan H. Liu

Last year Gamelyn Games took Kickstarter by storm with its first “Tiny Epic” game, Tiny Epic Kingdoms. This pocket-sized, fantasy-themed 4X game raised $286k on a $15k goal—fans loved all the stretch goals, and by the end of the campaign the $16 was an incredible value. Lightning struck again in July with Tiny Epic Defenders, a cooperative game (also set in the fantasy universe). Today, Gamelyn Games shoots for the stars with Tiny Epic Galaxies, a space-based empire-building game just launched on Kickstarter.

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